A two-hour outage of Facebook apps occurs just days after a massive outage of the social network
A two-hour outage of Facebook apps occurs just days after a massive outage of the social network
In just a few days after several of its major services went down for approximately six hours, Facebook experienced yet another outage on Friday morning.
On Friday, the company issued a statement through its verified Twitter account, saying, "We are aware that some users are experiencing difficulties accessing our apps and products." "We are working diligently to restore normalcy as soon as possible, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused."
It was also announced on Twitter that some Instagram users were experiencing difficulties. Instagram is a photo-sharing service owned by Facebook.
Approximately two hours after they began, Facebook said the issues had been resolved, and that they had been caused by a "configuration change" and were not related to the widespread outage that occurred earlier this week.
A statement from the company said, "Please accept our heartfelt apologies on behalf of anyone who has been unable to access our products over the last couple of hours." "We have resolved the issue, and everything should be back to normal at this point."
With only a few thousand reports on the tracking website Down Detector across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, the disruption was considered minor in comparison to Monday's outage. This represents a fraction of the previous outage.
The social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were all down for the majority of Monday's US day. Facebook later explained that the problem was caused by "configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers," which "caused issues that disrupted this communication." Facebook also apologized for the inconvenience.
The incidents that occurred on Friday bring a week of controversy to a close for Facebook. After identifying herself as the whistleblower who leaked several company documents to the Wall Street Journal the day before, Frances Haugen, a former product manager at the company, experienced a network outage on Monday afternoon.
When taken together, these documents and Haugen's testimony before the Senate Subcommission on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security revealed that Facebook was aware of a variety of issues relating to its apps, including Instagram's potential "toxic" effect on adolescent girls, but chose to remain silent.
Three sources familiar with the situation told CNN that Haugen is also expected to appear before a House select committee investigating the riot at the United States Capitol on January 6, as well.
